


Crushed Velvet

by Living_Underground



Category: The X-Files
Genre: A dress that didn't fit any more, F/M, It all revolved around a dress, Mulder and Scully slow dance, Mulder saves the day, Post-Cancer Arc (X-Files), Prom '98, Some harmless flirting?, WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT?, a charity gala that they are supposed to go to but dont, and a man who would always save her, as always, by being a cute adorable dork, it has everything, it has that too!, it's a little angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24232357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Living_Underground/pseuds/Living_Underground
Summary: Scully and Mulder go to the FBI Charity Gala. Only they don't because Scully is upset. So Mulder makes it better. It's cute, trust me. Set some time post-Postmodern Prometheus.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 5
Kudos: 55





	Crushed Velvet

**Author's Note:**

> I...this was meant to be a really angsty little piece (like, 600 words, seriously) about Scully's post-cancer feelings. And then Mulder swooped in to save the day without my permission. And it became...this. I literally just wanted to write about a dress I designed and knew I would never be bothered to actually make.
> 
> Why is it when I want something to be fluffy it ends up angsty and when I want something to be angsty it ends up fluffy? Like, what is that? Where is the justice?

All she could see when she opened her closet was the body-bag. Black and daunting as it hung there like a pupating chrysalis. Or a vampire bat. Only, it wasn’t a body-bag. It didn’t hold the soup-like makings of a moth. It held some of the fear of a vampire bat, but that was just anxiety talking. She took a breath and removed the garment bag from its place, tugging the zip down and letting her fingers brush across the crushed velvet of the dress.

She’d bought it last year, two months in advance of the charity gala all agents had been invited to attend. _Invited_ to be read as _required_. On pain of death, or worse. When she had tried it on, her mother outside the dressing room offering helpful and unhelpful advice alike, she’d been thinking of a certain agent and the colour of his eyes. She’d run her hand down the front, turning to the side as her palm lay flat on her stomach, wondering whether the exposed canvas of pale skin at the back, where his hand usually rested, would entice him to take her home.

This was pre-nosebleeds. Pre-Philadelphia and tattoos and drunken decisions. Pre-diagnosis and sickness and dying.

The velvet had clung to her then. Revealed curves she hid so often with bulky blazers. Her arms and torso was encased in it, and at her hips, it had draped to the floor where it pooled, ripples on a sun-dappled pond. And as it spilled back over her shoulders it had gaped, wide open, ending in a cowl at the base of her spine, just below the indent her partner’s hand had claimed for its own.

Now, as she slipped into the cool material and stared at herself in the mirror, she wished she had gotten to wear it when it still fit.

She had looked almost beautiful when she bought it.

Now her cheeks were sallow and her hair was thinner and duller and she could run her fingers down her ribs like a xylophone. Bones stood out where they hadn’t before. A body once wound in muscle was little more than a skeleton in skin now.

She’d dropped two dress sizes. She knew it. Had gotten her mother to go out and get her some new work clothes the day after she had gone into remission. She hadn’t looked at the size tags, but she knew what they said anyway.

The emerald, where it had once shown soft, feminine curves, now hung loose on her, like she was merely the coat hanger it had spent the past year on. The expanse of her back, where once she could see her toned muscles rippling as she turned to look, she could now see sharp, broken wings and the notches of a spine that was barely holding her up. A fractured angel.

Finding it less hard than she used to, she reached around her stomach and traced a circle around her ouroboros, letting out the sob she had been trying so hard to keep in. Her whole, slight body wracked with it and before she knew it she was on the floor, curled at the foot of her bed, unable to move for the strangled cries that shook her.

She’d chosen the dress because it matched his eyes and because it left her back free for his warm hands to roam. She’d chosen the dress because she wanted to seduce him. She’d had a plan. Fuck-me shoes, lightly curled hair and a smile that could warm even the coldest of hearts if she wanted it to.

Her plan did not involve hospital rooms or dead abductees.

A hand on her damp cheek, one fluttering around to find a pulse and take her temperature, had her calming down enough to open her eyes and stare at the face looking down at her with concern. ‘Hey, you weren’t answering the door, so I let myself in,’ he was easing her up to sitting and placing a glass of water in her shaking hands. ‘What happened? Are you sick? Do you need me to call a doctor?’ He was already drawing his cell from the pocket of his tux.

‘No. I just…I’m fine, Mulder.’

‘You don’t look fine,’ his gaze didn’t stray from her face, and she wondered not for the first time whether it was too late for seduction. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s stupid. I’m being stupid. It’s nothing.’

He looked sceptical, then shrugged and stood up. ‘Okay. We’re going to be late,’ calling her bluff was probably not the _best_ way to do this, but he knew it was the only way he could get her to ‘fess up.

‘I…’ she didn’t stand up, just watched him walk to the door. ‘I don’t think I should go. You go. Enjoy yourself, have fun.’

‘I’m not going without you. These things are no fun without a date.’

‘I’m not your date, Mulder. You said it yourself, we’re going together because we’re partners and neither of us have lives enough to get dates.’

It was true. He had said that. He hadn’t _meant_ it though. He’d just said it to make her feel more comfortable about going with him. ‘Is that the problem? You’d rather not go with Spooky?’ He was teasing, mostly. Of course, she’d rather be going with an actual date, he didn’t blame her – he’d rather be going with her as his _actual_ date – but that didn’t mean he was automatically impervious to the bitterness that laced his thoughts.

‘Mulder…’

‘Come on, maybe you can meet someone to fall in love with there. They’ll catch your eyes across the dance floor and they’ll be instantly, hopelessly in love with you,’ a smiled at her, ‘and then next year you can go with an actual date, and not just your partner.’

She wanted to tell him he wasn’t _just_ her partner, but the words wouldn’t come. He was talking about her falling in love with someone else. ‘Maybe if you go without me that will happen for you?’

He shook his head with a sad smile. ‘Never going to happen, Scully. Even I don’t believe in possibilities that extreme. Come on, there are bad canapés and expensive drinks waiting for us.’ She shook her head, mumbling her excuse. ‘I didn’t catch that, Scully.’

She inhaled deeply, looking up at him. ‘My dress. It doesn’t fit,’ she looked back down and started fiddling with the velvet around her knees, her voice lost to the floor. ‘I bought it for last year’s gala. I just wanted to wear it once. But I’ve…lost weight, and, uh…it’s too big.’

‘Okay,’ he nodded with a smile. ‘Okay.’

She expected him to leave at that, so when she heard him shuffling hangers in her wardrobe she sat up and looked over her bed at him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Finding something for you to wear.’

‘Mulder, I don’t…I don’t _have_ anything to wear, that’s the problem. Nothing fits.’

‘Hmmm… okay,’ he closed the door to the closet and walked over to her dresser instead. Knowing exactly what he was looking for this time, he grabbed a pair of her satin pyjama bottoms and one of his sweaters, one he’d given to her when she was in the hospital and she was cold, chucking them both over to her. ‘Get changed, I’ll be back in thirty,’ and then he ducked out of her room, leaving her sat confounded with pyjama bottoms and sweater in her hands.

* * *

He returned, half an hour later, with a cool-bag in one hand a blockbuster bag in the other, a garment bag draped over his arm. After letting himself in he deposited the cool-bag in the kitchen and had knocked on her bedroom door, finding her in the process of removing her smeared makeup. ‘Hey. I have a surprise.’

‘I don’t like surprises.’

‘I know, but this one’s good, I promise,’ he smiled softly at her reflection in the mirror.

‘Mulder…I just want to go to bed…’

‘Please? You’ll like it, I promise’

‘Fine, what is it?’

Without speaking he proffered the black bag, nodding encouragement to her when she looked sceptically at him. She unzipped it whilst it remained hanging over his arm, hesitant and keeping it at arm’s length as to if she were diffusing a bomb. ‘It’s not as nice as your other one, but I don’t really dress shop very much.’

‘Mulder…’ how could she tell him, after he had done this, that she really just didn’t want to leave her apartment? She wanted to curl up and forget the whole thing. But he had tried so hard, so she slid her fingers up the silk and unhooked the straps of the dress from the hanger. She noticed, as she held the black slip dress up, that he had taken the tags off, but it looked like it would fit. ‘How did you know my size?’

‘I’m an FBI agent, aren’t I?’ He tried a light, teasing tone, but it fell flat in the stifling tension of the bedroom. ‘I called your Mom.’

‘You called my _mom_?’ She wasn’t sure whether she should shout, cry or laugh. ‘What did you tell her?’

‘I think she guessed when I called her asking for your dress size. Um, she suggested I get a shawl-wrap-thingy to go with it, so uh…’ he slipped out the soft shawl, soft light pink to curl around her shoulders and arms, mask scars from cannulas and syringes.

‘You…you didn’t have to do this.’

‘Yeah, I did. I’ll be in the living room. Take your time to get ready,’ he smiled at her, slipping away from the room to give her privacy.

* * *

Mulder leapt up from his seat on her sofa when she walked through. She was gorgeous. Radiant. Sad. He made his way tentatively towards her, hand behind his back. He cleared his throat. ‘Scully?’

‘Mmm?’ She looked up at him, exhausted. She didn’t want to go to the gala. She didn’t want to be stared at and whispered about. Most of the time she could block it out and ignore it, the gossip didn’t usually bother her, but she was so tired.

‘Will you go to the prom with me?’ A corsage was presented to her, pink and dark green matching the dress she should have been wearing and the shawl she was wearing.

‘I…’ and then she looked at her apartment. He’d blown black and pink balloons up, pinning them to the ceiling and scattering them around the floor. Gold streamers hung from her curtain rails and littered her desk. A bottle of Champagne stood on her coffee table, alongside a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries and a bowl of popcorn. A pile of movies sat on top of her TV. Music playing just too quiet to be able to identify what Cher was singing about.

‘Prom à la Mulder. It’s no black-tie charity gala, but we have music and champagne and movies for when we can’t dance anymore,’ his hopeful look was that of a child who had done everything they could to make a bad situation better. When she didn’t respond, his face fell, ‘I just…I figured you probably didn’t want to go to the thing anyway, but I thought you still deserved to have a nice night.’

Her voice caught, ‘thank you, Mulder. It’s…it’s perfect.’

He nodded, awkward all of a sudden as he wracked his brains for something to say, to ease the tension that had pressed in on the room. ‘I, uh…camera. We need a photo. A prom photo. Your mom, she…she said she wanted a photo.’ Mrs Scully had said nothing of the sort, but he’d send her one anyway. He knew Scully had brought a camera during one of their cases, a digital thing that he distrusted more than film, that she had started using to document the things she saw in her life, the day to day things she wanted people in the future to know about, people like her mom and her brothers' kids, and him. It wasn’t ever discussed between them, but he understood without her explaining. She wanted to leave something behind. She wanted to leave proof.

She’d stopped carrying the camera around with them when they travelled now.

He also knew she kept the camera on her bookshelf; he’d poked around her place enough times to know where things were kept. And so, he grabbed it, manoeuvring her to stand in front of the closed curtains framed by balloons and streamers, protests on her lips as she complained, pouted at the lens as he acted like a mother sending her daughter off to her first dance. No such thing as too many photos of her, just put your arm there, hold it like that, yeah, that’s right, beautiful, you know that don’t you?

A blush, the pout melding into a shy smile.

A photo to start a new era. A new life.

‘If I have to have my photo taken, so do you.’

It was his turn to protest then, as she grabbed the camera from his hand, laughing as he stuck his tongue out, smiling when he gave a bashful little grin.

And then she started pressing buttons, brow furrowed, lip tucked between teeth. A beep. The camera set on the table and she was hurrying over to slip herself into his side, looking up at him with a winning smile as her arms went around his waist. She tilted her face up to his, reached up slightly to press her lips to his jaw. Chaste. Sweet. There and gone in a flash, the click of the shutter.

That photo wouldn’t be going to her mother. It would be kept in a shoebox on top of a pink shawl, along with a dried corsage.

They slow-danced, just them in her apartment, bare feet on the wooden floor. Noses buried in the cotton of his shirt and the honey of her hair. Arms clinging to one another for dear life, not leaving room for a god neither was entirely convinced existed, but one of them wanted to believe in.

They remained, when the cassette ended and they were left in silence, swaying gently to a song that was all their own. And then, when she started slumping against him, letting him take more of her weight, he pulled back, tilted her chin up between fingertips, swiped an errant tear from her cheek. ‘Happy or sad?’

‘Both.’ And he nodded because that was okay. He understood. She was alive. She had missed a year of her life, had lost so much, but she was alive, here, dancing in his arms.

‘You wanna watch a film?’

Her turn to nod. ‘You pick though.’

‘Okay.’ He took the top cassette from the pile, not actually looking at what it was, slipped it into her VCR. When he turned back to her, she was curled up on the sofa, a blanket wrapped around her, space for him next to her. She was in the process of popping the cork on the champagne.

‘You didn’t bring glasses through.’

‘I couldn’t find any flutes in the cupboard.’

‘Probably because I don’t usually drink champagne. I don’t often find myself having the occasion to.’

‘Well then, we’ll just have to drink it like drunk teenagers…’ her lips were already around the neck of the bottle by the time he gulped his way through the last word. She smirked, passing the bottle to him and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, settling back to watch a film that neither of them would actually pay attention to.

Half a bowl of popcorn and two-thirds of a bottle later and she was dozing on his shoulder, mouth open, leaking drool and light snores. The back of his finger against her cheekbone had her stirring, nuzzling further into his warmth. ‘Hey, Aurora.’

She murmured and mumbled before her eyelids fluttered open to stare up at him. ‘‘Rora?’ She asked with a yawn.

‘Yeah, _Sleeping Beauty_.’

‘Big fan of Disney, are you, Mulder?’

‘No, but I had a kid sister. Come on, bedtime.’

‘Mmm, you gonna take me to the motel down the road for a bad night of awkward teen passion?’ Champagne Scully was clearly flirty Scully. He was sure she hadn’t drunk that much.

He shook his head, ‘your mom gave us a curfew. Home by midnight.’

‘Or the carriage will turn back to a pumpkin?’

‘Something like that. Come on, I’ll walk you to your door.’

She took his hand as he pulled her up. ‘How gentlemanly.’

‘I try my best. Come on, you need sleep,’ he walked her to her bedroom door, stopping and turning to her as she reached to open it. ‘Thank you for going to prom with me, Scully.’

‘Mulder…’ the joke on her tongue died as she looked up at him. The earnest look in his eyes had her hand cupping his cheek, tugging him down gently to brush her lips against his. ‘Thank you for being my date tonight. And for…everything.’

‘It was my pleasure. Goodnight, Scully,’ his thumb, ghosting across her lips.

‘You’re not coming in?’

He smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘Not tonight. One night, I promise, but not tonight. Tonight we were teenagers.’

She understood. It was not the answer she wanted, but she understood. He wanted her to be of a clear mind, certain that it was what she wanted, not just as a result of a long day and champagne. ‘I’ll hold you to that,’ she murmured, pressing her lips to his slightly harder, lingering slightly longer, grinning and pulling back just as he reciprocated, pressing a kiss quickly to the corner of his mouth before turning to her door. ‘Goodnight, Mulder.’

‘Goodnight, Scully.’

She would wake the next morning, dreams of slow-dancing with her partner and the brush of his lips heavy in her mind, to find her apartment neat and tidy, all squared away, the only evidence of the previous night the black dress hanging on the back of her door and the pouch of photos he'd had printed slipped across his desk a week later.

**Author's Note:**

> I...I want a man who will make me prom at home. 
> 
> Some things to address. 
> 
> Scully doesn't have champagne flutes - she goes to her mother's for all celebratory holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and NYE, or she is working. She has no use for them. Fight me.
> 
> Mulder and Samantha probably didn't watch Disney as kids. I can hardly imagine either of them sitting in front of a Disney film, let alone Teena Mulder sitting them in front of one. I don't even know why I put that there, but it's cute and fluffy. Bite me.
> 
> I do not believe Mulder ever went to prom as a teenager. Because he is a dork and I as a fellow dork know that whilst he was a cute dork, the people who would want to go to prom with him would probably not, as teenagers at least, have had the courage to ask him to prom, and he is so self-deprecating he would never have asked anyone and would also have probably not gone alone. I think this is partially why I left it with him leaving Scully at her bedroom door. Both of them would willingly have taken it further, but then Mulder would have been scared that he was just acting on his dorky teenage fantasies and Scully was just letting him because, hell, she's alive and buzzed on champagne. Not the case for either of them, but their fears rule their relationship.


End file.
